Meek, music and murder
QUESTION How did producer Joe Meek create the eerie sounds that make up the first and last 14 seconds of Telstar? JOE MEEK created the brilliant beginning and end of Telstar by recording the sound of a flushing toilet!
Robert George ‘Joe’ Meek was born in Gloucestershire, southwest England, in 1929. A compulsive electronic tinkerer, after National Service he became a junior engineer at Lansdowne House recording studios in London.
In 1960, the resourceful maverick established RGM Sounds Ltd at 304 Holloway Road, North London. It was an address that would witness music, mayhem, madness and murder.
In 1962, the world’s first communications satellite, Telstar, was launched. It was Joe’s eureka moment. He subconsciously composed a melody, collaborated with his back-up team and laid the subliminal tune onto magnetic tape.
His house band, the Outlaws, were re-launched as the Tornados, and the instrumental was leased to Decca records.
A monophonic – a single melodic line without harmonies or melody – keyboard underpins the production, with accompanying drum, bass, rhythm and lead guitars, piano, Lowrey electronic organ and spectral vocals. The eerie sounds, drenched in reverb, echo and multi-dubbing, were augmented by the flushing of a toilet, played backwards and speeded up.
It sold five million copies, the world’s biggest seller in 1962. Six months after its release, Frenchman Jean Ledrut filed a plagiarism suit. It was alleged a fournote motif had been lifted from a background score he wrote for the film Austerlitz. RGM’s royalty payments were blocked.
Even without the court case, Meek was an emotional wreck because of his preoccupation with the occult, seances trying to connect with his idol Buddy Holly, unrequited love for a member of his band, barbiturates abuse and paranoia.
Despite further hits, on February 3, 1967, the eighth anniversary of Holly’s death, Meek killed his landlady, Violet Shenton, and turned the shotgun on himself.
The plagiarism suit was quashed three weeks later.
David Morgan, Laleham, Middx.
Plantation settlers displaced the Irish-speaking people who were native to Ulster. Scottish settlers brought their own Scots language, which was then the everyday language of lowland Scotland. Meanwhile, English settlers introduced their late-medieval form of English.
Scottish settlers had been going to the north of Ireland for at least a generation before King James I launched the plantations in 1610. Settlements continued right through the 17th century.
In the 1690s, a famine in Scotland led to increased Scottish migration to Ulster.
Many Scots sailed across the narrow channel dividing southwest Scotland from the north of Ireland. They headed for areas that were easy to reach from Scotland, including the Lough Foyle estuary near Co. Derry and the Ards Peninsula in Co. Down. The Scots also brought their religion. Presbyterianism arrived in the North in 1613.
The aim of the early-17th century plantations was to bring thousands of settlers from both Scotland and England to settle the lands wrested from the Gaelic lords west of the River Bann.
A substantial number of English settlers also arrived, heading for inland places such as Co. Armagh, the Lagan Valley, near Belfast, south Co. Tyrone and Co. Fermanagh.
All these settlements, Scottish and English, had a profound effect on the everyday language of the North which, until then, had been predominantly Irish.
The language of the settlers continues to the present day in the form of Ulster Scots. However, the Scots language spoken in the North was profoundly influenced by Irish, borrowing words and grammatical constructions. It was the same with the English spoken by English settlers.
Despite the influx of settlers, the Gaelic-speaking Irish were still present in strong numbers across the North by the middle of the 17th century. Elsewhere in Ireland, the Irish language competed strongly with English until well into the 19th century, including in certain parts of north Co. Tyrone and in much of Co. Donegal.
Just as Irish was banished from most parts of the North, so too was Scots replaced by English, at least in written form. The plantations had meant direct rule from London, meaning English became the language of government and commerce as well as the main language for any form of written documents. Ulster Scots and Irish were relegated to being the language of the countryside.
Today, Ulster Scots is still used in daily life in northeast Co. Down. It is also spoken in north, mid and east Co. Antrim, north Co. Derry and in east Co. Donegal.
Chris Bird, Cheltenham, Glos. QUESTION What is the origin of the @ symbol? THOUGH part of every email address, the @ symbol dates back to the 14th century.
The earliest example is found in the 1345 Bulgarian translation of the 12th-century Manasses Chronicle, an ancient manuscript providing a synopsis of the world’s history. Here, @ appears to be shorthand for ‘amen’.
Another early example is a letter written by Florentine merchant Francesco Lapi in 1536. He used @ to denote a unit of measure – an amphora (clay jar) of wine, equivalent to 1/13th of a barrel.
It made its way onto typewriter keyboards in the 19th century. It was US computer engineer Ray Tomlinson who chose the @ symbol to separate the address elements in a computer message.
In 1971, he was working in Massachusetts for Arpanet, a network of computers that was the precursor to the internet. He needed a system to send electronic messages. He reasoned that a symbol separating the two elements of the address could not be commonly used as it would cause confusion. He settled on @, poised above ‘P’ on his teletype.